Businesses may use accounting systems, including financial enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, primarily for compliance purposes (e.g., International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), United States-Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (US-GAAP)) and rarely make use of management accounting modules for performance or profitability. A deeper analysis indicates adoption barriers in such environments. These include, for example, complicated system landscapes, as well as complex and expensive customization projects that suggest a wrong degree of flexibility, inadequate reporting capabilities, or lack of knowledge. Due to these reasons, management accounting and reporting mainly takes places using spreadsheets rather than in the financial ERP systems directly, with controllers or accountants manually pulling data from the financial system into spreadsheets for further processing. However, spreadsheets have a long list of shortcomings, such as missing data integrity, inconsistent master data, or inadequate sharing and comparing capabilities. The widespread use of spreadsheets may cause severe reporting and data integrity problems in companies.
Financial ERP systems may be powerful and adequate: for capturing massive amounts of business data and for defining strict models that can be used company-wide to report in a compliant, legally binding, and consistent manner. However, for management accounting purposes, individuals need to impose their own structures on the ERP data in a flexible manner, e.g., by splitting up data among projects, employees, individual cost categories, etc. What may be desired is to model, in a sense, an individual's own business view or “business reality”. Here, the classic ERP model may be too rigid, strict, and inflexible. For these reasons, businesses use spreadsheets to accomplish tasks where the ERP model falls short.